Using a 1gb usb drive i installed usb-hdd from vmware and dsl-n boots fine on my house machine but when I take it to school I set up the bios to boot from usb and when it trys to boot it gives the error "boot failed" and I hit enter and it just boots up windows. How do I make it bootable from the school computer or fix the error?

you can't format because once you start the usb-hdd install it automaticly makes 1 partion but using the usb-zip it worked on my school computer because it made 2 partions.
but I also use windows and the zip partion makes 900mb of my drive unreadable by windows because it only supports tumb drives with 1 partion so I would like to try and find another solution to usb-hdd booting.

I believe that by default, DSL-N will try to restore settings from sda1.

If your USB stick is connected when you boot from CD, DSL-N sould try to restore settings from the USB stick. If for some reason, your USB stick is not sda1, you can boot with the cheatcode restore=sdb1 or wherever your USB stick appears.